Moving and Growing Pains

I can't pretend that I'm not completely heartbroken about moving.

I have been careful with my feelings this time we went up to Rexburg, this time Skywalker applied for a job. I feel like this is a blessing Heavenly Father is giving us, and that complaining about it is somewhat like my kids complaining when I give them snack and it's not what they wanted that morning. Only bigger. Of course.

I don't know what I'm writing. Anyway... suffice it to say things feel confused, and stressful. Anxiety at an all-time high right now.

I feel heartbroken, saying goodbye to friends. The Bounouses have been my friends, my good friends, during a lot of difficult times, and they stuck by me when anybody else would have shipped me off to the funny farm or stopped returning my phone calls.

I will be very sad to say goodbye to my voice teacher, Dr. Bounous (also friend, and stand-in priesthood help on occasion). Dude, can I just say how much I love this man. I love him, love him, love him and will miss him, miss him, miss him.

I will miss Debbie Bounous as well. She is another kind of friend to me--the one who is motherly and sisterly and whom I can vent ridiculous things to that I wouldn't really talk to most people about. And she has been a stand in mother to my daughter when I was too fractured emotionally or my schedule got crazy.

Her daughter is like my daughter's sister. They are emotionally, sisters. Loli will be heartbroken to leave, and I know there will be rough times for her as she adjusts to the idea that she no longer has Jennie, to play with whenever she wants. We're going to try to set something up like an email account so they can be penpals, but my big worry is that the natural thing will happen--they will grow apart, and loli will have a hard time making new friends. She's pretty shy. She's one of those kids other kids usually like, but I'm afraid she'll struggle for a while.

Skywalker and I will miss the Lovelesses. They have been our sanity these last few years. We've had so much fun, joked and talked and played and it was really sort of like a "relationship" between couples... I don't know how else to explain it. A friendship that developed only between two units of couplehood instead of two people. I have never had that, and I don't have a lot of faith Skywalker and I will have it again, especially not on the same level as the friendship we have with these two.

Dave is hilarious. He's one of my favorite people because he's at the same time un-apologetically imperfect and proud of who he is. Confident, but also willing to admit to needing people. Courntey is one of my favorite people because she is so logical and accepting and just GOOD, like, Good Mormon girl, and yet she knows how to have fun, too. And she's not phased by, or judgmental about, my weird past or by my sometimes lack of function as a parent, right in front of her. How many people in this world are like that?

I will miss my sisters, who are so fun to be around when we do get together... our family culture takes over and we laugh a lot and have our little inside quips and things nobody else really gets. And I won't have them around to check my persecution complexes or tendency to exaggerate... I just won't be as good a person without them around.

I will miss my homeschooling group. THey are such lovely women, so down-to-earth and no-drama (most of the time.) So accepting and intelligent and just... the salt of the earth. I feel at home when I am with them. I feel like I am with people who share nearly all my values and priorities and so I don't have to defend myself at all. And those great kids. My kids will miss their kids.

I will miss my writing critique group. My newest set of friends; hilarious, fun, such a great fit. We all have different writing-related talents, and when we help each other it's so full of fun and happiness and enjoyment, it's almost like a writing support group--a place for people who sit huddled over a laptop, half-hiding the screen from the view of those who might be reading over their shoulder, but secretly have this burning desire to slap their writing all over every billboard and force feed our words to the world. I feel like these are the people who I am intellectually related to. We writers are weird folks. We are. We're sort of like carnival workers--you don't know until you're on the inside how great it can be to be a part of the community.

I will miss my mountains. I have never hiked timp, I have hiked the Y exactly two times. I have never done any camping in these mountains that have stretched over me these last 10 years. I still can't quite believe this. I can't believe I haven't found my special places in these mountains. There's been too much on my plate... I say. But I won't be making that same mistake in Rexburg. I don't want to have any more mountain regrets like the ones I'm feeling right now.

I will miss my Provo. Over the last three years I have been writing an historical fiction about Provo in its early days. I have gotten to know families, whole families with names like Wall and Bean and Baum and Cluff, Haws and Holdaway and Miller and Turner. Every time I walk past an old monument here in town, I scan the fine print for names. And almost every time, I find them, and a sense of happiness and mystery floods through me. A burning desire to get to know these people, and the town they lived in. I drive on the streets that run through the center of town and see the uneven sidewalks and think, what building's foundation lies under here. Was it Stuart's old store? The tithing house? the schoolhouse? the old Seminary Building? I look at the crossed sidewalks in pioneer park and see the crossed, dirt paths, like an X through the center square of the old town-plat map from 1880. I look at where the stream used to run by 5th west, and think of the old city run.

I look at the tabernacle with its collapsed roof and the burn-marks on the walls and what remains of my teenage-magical-thinking causes me to wonder if, somehow, I did that. I'm leaving, and it feels almost like a betrayal.

Already I'm frantically planning, scanning maps, googling like there's no tommorrow to find what I'll need in this new city of mine. I've even got the faint sketches of a plot in my mind, a story I could write about Rexburg, so that I can grow to love it faster, this time. A new writing critique group, a new voice teacher, a new novel, a new homeschooling group--all these are doable.

New friends? I don't know how doable that is. And how quick it would be likely to happen. But I can try. Not too hard--if you try too hard, people don't like you all that much. I have to be casual, do the whole "half smile and look away" thing. I have to keep all the controversial topics that seem to want to leap out of me during every conversation under control. I have to pay attention to faces and tone and make sure I don't offend everybody I meet right off the bat.

There's a James Taylor song: Shower the people you love with love. Show them the way that you feel. Things are going to work out fine if you only will...

this has always been hard for me. How do you tell someone you love them? I tell Skywalker every day, but how do you tell a friend you love them, a teacher, a group of people, without making them feel weird. Unfortunately in our society it doesn't really come all that easy.

I guess that's what a blog could be for.